Edited by Trotter on 2025-12-1 8:14:57 AM UTC Edited by Trotter on 2025-12-1 5:39:12 PM UTC
2025-5-19 6:17:09 AM UTC
The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his world of Middle-earth. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D.C. Drout explores Tolkien’s genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of works from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion to lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as his poetry. We see how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how, early on, Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala and other medieval literature from Northern Europe, and how he later developed the complex form of sorrow that is the primary theme of his mature works. Sweeping and hugely perceptive The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew.
Mr. Underhill and I had a chance to talk at length with Professor Drout about his new book. I very much enjoyed reading The Tower and the Ruin, and found it to be an excellent scholarly study in addition to being a moving and poignant personal memoir of Drout's relationship with Tolkien's writings through his life. Highly recommended book!
For me,Tolkien's fiction is wonderful literature and his corpus is up there with the very best,a very select group. It is immortal. As a work of imagination,his body of work is unparalleled in its depth and beauty. LOTR was my first intimate acquaintance with great literature. It was lightning from a clear sky and the rolling thunder never diminished. Tolkien moved me utterly,filling me with profound awe and naked wonder. His writing is terrifying. It is terrifically re-readable. It compels me and I'm like a kid in a candy store with each new posthumous work from M.E,manna from heaven. Never in my imaginings was I so excited for a book as the day I held the just released Silmarillion and I could finally read this haunting work. Such largesse. LOTR was the start of my life long journey through great literature and I will always be so grateful to the good Professor for bursting the door wide open for a young spotty adolescent. Tolkien has never left me and my obsession never faded for I become more obsessed with passing time. Gotta go as I've got my nightly Proust to read he he.
The NY Times piece is deeply moving in a way that captures the essence of Tolkien. His unimaginable personal loss and reservoir of resilience and hope he finds in Tolkien’s vision made me cry the first time I read the article and again when I read it aloud to my wife as I contemplated my own son.
The last paragraph is beautiful and devastating:
That the same Middle-earth is filled with sorrow and unrecoverable loss — that the work itself seems battered by time and change — only helps us believe that perhaps the sudden turn to the good may happen in our own fallen existence. A light springs in the shadows, a single star gleams high above the cloud-wrack, and we catch a glimpse of the joy beyond the walls of the world because it is real. We see a path toward a place not free of sorrow but in which tears are blessed without bitterness because beyond the circles of the world, there is more than memory. We find hope.
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